


you laughed and you complained, but you didn't drown

by Princex_N



Series: an eccentric who looks good in jeans [3]
Category: Psych
Genre: Autism, Autistic Shawn, Caretaking, Casual Ableism, Codependency, Dyspraxia, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Hyposensitivity, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Injury, Platonic Life Partners
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 17:13:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16623056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princex_N/pseuds/Princex_N
Summary: It's not Gus taking care of Shawn, it's the two of them helping each other equally.Gus just wishes more people saw it that way.





	you laughed and you complained, but you didn't drown

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from [THIS comic by @asoftersea](https://asoftersea.tumblr.com/post/177813254495/211-aquarius) on tumblr, which is an Amazing series that you should check out!

Gus doesn't buy into works like "Care-Taker" but sometimes it's just the word that works. 

"Shawn! Will you slow down?" The words are barely out of his mouth before Shawn walks straight into the door-frame, his shoulder wrenching backwards from the force of impact. Shawn, predictably, moves on as if nothing has happened; the slightly off-kilter lean to his step the only indicator of what had just happened. "Shawn!" Gus snaps again. 

He is, predictably, ignored. 

He follows Shawn into the Chief's office and tries not to look exasperated as the 'psychic' gives his diatribe on what had occurred. That doesn't mean that the awkward way Shawn moves his arm escapes Gus's attention, and the moment they're back in their own office, Gus steps in. 

"Let me see," he demands, effectively cornering Shawn in to prevent an escape. 

"No thanks, I'm busy," Shawn replies easily, eyes fixed over Gus's shoulder as he makes a false attempt to get someone's attention through their ridiculous window. 

"Shawn!" 

Shawn sighs, over-exaggerated, and rolls his eyes. "Alright, Uncle Bad-Touch, but hands off until after the second date." 

There's a brief scuffle over Shawn's shirt, and Gus could almost be swayed to leave him alone by the obvious displeasure on Shawn's face,  _if_ it wasn't followed by justification when he surveys the damage. 

Shawn's shoulder is bruised to hell, of course, but there's also the matter of the still slightly bleeding bite marks lining his arms. 

"Shawn," Gus mutters, and fails to avoid the tone of exasperation from leaking into his voice. And Shawn, ever used to being on the receiving end of  _that_ tone, falters and bolsters himself up simultaneously. 

"It's fine, it doesn't even hurt," he snaps dismissively, making a halfhearted attempt to pull his arm out of Gus's grip. 

"You know that doesn't make it any better," Gus retorts, and ignores the whine of annoyance that Shawn lets out. He goes and gets the disinfectant and the first-aid kit, because first aid  _is_ important, regardless of how Shawn sees it as nothing more than an annoyance. 

He works in silence and hasn't decided if he is going to say anything or not when Shawn makes the decision for him. 

"I didn't  _mean_ to," Shawn mutters mulishly, not flinching as Gus cleans out the bruised and broken skin of a bite on his bicep. "It just... happens, and it hurts, and then there's no other option."

"I've said you could call." 

"Yeah, but that's not what people  _do_. People,  _grown men,_ do not call their grown man friend at three in the morning to ask for a fucking deep pressure hug." 

Gus rolls his eyes. "Grown men do not call their grown man friends in the middle of the night, crying, because they had a nightmare and want company and a milkshake." Shawn opens his mouth to protest, but stops when Gus shoves lightly at his (un-bruised) shoulder. "We're not normal, Shawn. We never have been, and that's not a bad thing." 

"And that's not a bad thing," Shawn echoes, almost mockingly, but Gus knows better. 

* * *

Gus knows that Shawn is never going to be the type of person who stops to take care of himself. That's why he's there to do it for him. 

It isn't that Shawn is  _incapable_ of taking care of himself. He did it just fine during the years that the two of them had lived in separate places, when Gus went to college and Shawn bounced between jobs. Neither of them have ever appreciated the idea that Gus is somehow  _better_ than Shawn is, especially since both of them know from firsthand experiences that the statement is patently untrue. Shawn can do a lot of things that Gus could never hope to accomplish. 

It isn't that one of them is better than the other, it's just that the two of them even each other out. Shawn encourages Gus to take risks, Gus encourages Shawn to slow down every once in a while. Gus smooths out Shawn's interactions with some people, and Shawn pushes Gus out of his comfort zone with others. 

It's not Gus taking care of Shawn, it's the two of them helping each other equally. 

Gus just wishes more people saw it that way.

* * *

Gus is used to being the only one between him and Shawn that really  _worries_ about things, but sometimes they're really cutting it close. 

Like when a woman aims and fires a fucking  _gun_ in Shawn's direction, and the man's only reaction is to leap forward and try to wrestle the weapon from her. Gus will admit to crying out when the gun goes off, but only because Lassiter also lets out a panicked sounding, "Christ, Spencer," before leaping into the fray to get a handle on things. 

While Lassiter is wrestling the now-unarmed woman into a cop car, Gus is wrestling with Shawn's shirt. 

"She didn't hit me, I'm fine, quit being such a worry-wart, Gus," Shawn snaps, but doesn't actually do anything to stop him because he knows by now that Gus won't let it go until he's sure. 

And Gus is glad he does, because there is a graze (barely), open and bleeding (barely), and there. Gus resists the urge to gloat. Shawn peers down at the mark and scoffs. "Oh please," he gripes dismissively. "That's not even the worst mark down there." 

It's not. Between the bruises (from running into doorways), and scrapes (from running into sharp-cornered furniture), and smaller injuries (from those nights when the Need doesn't dissipate, and he needs some kind of release), the graze is barely noticeable. But noticed, Gus has, and he's not letting it go until it's been cleaned and properly attended to. 

"God, Shawn, what happened? Doesn't all of that hurt?" Julia asks, coming up from behind them and gaping. Shawn gives Gus a slightly too hard elbow in the ribs that means  _I told you we should have waited,_ and Gus responds with a Look that says  _No, we couldn't, Shawn. Infections can be serious_. 

"It can take a lot of pain for me to notice it," Shawn admits grudgingly. "Hyposensitivity; a blessing in disguise." 

"Or a curse," Gus mutters unhappily, more than aware of what the hyposensitivity and under-stimulation tends to actually mean for Shawn. 

"I've heard it both ways," Shawn retorts, predictably. 

Gus fights the urge to roll his eyes, but judging by the noise Shawn makes in the back of his throat, he wasn't particularly successful. 

* * *

Every once in a while, Shawn jokes that Gus is about 90% of his impulse control, and Gus doesn't have a hard time believing him. 

One would think that, by now, Gus would be used to that, but somehow, he still manages to find himself surprised. 

When they were younger it was usually things like shoving non-food items into his mouth or getting suckered into some scam (alright, so maybe these things still happen every once in a while). Now that they're older, and unsettlingly involved in the Santa Barbara area crime life, it tends to be much more dramatic. 

Like chasing a fleeing suspect through a busy parking lot and straight into the path of an oncoming car. 

One of these days, Shawn is going to give Gus a heart attack; that's just going to be a thing that happens. 

To his credit, Shawn does seem okay. But judging by the fact that it took him nearly a whole minute to force himself back to his feet means that Gus isn't going to let him slide away without getting looked over this time. 

"Look, I'm totally fine," Shawn says defensively, trying in vain to circumvent Gus to go back to his chase. "I'm not even bleeding, and you already checked for a concussion. Plus, the car hit my side and not my head, so it's really not even a big deal." 

The way that Shawn is  _definitely_ shivering despite the 80-degree weather and how he seems a lot paler than he usually is doesn't inspire any relief in Gus at all. 

"I'm pretty sure you're in shock, actually. You need to sit down." 

"Shock?" Shawn repeats incredulously, the way he usually repeats things when he gets hurt and Gus tries to stop him from making it worse. "I'm not surprised at all. I knew that guy was going to run, I could see it from like a mile away. I also knew he was guilty, we both knew that way before we even noticed him here." 

Gus can't tell if he's being serious or if he's trying to make a joke. "That's not what I mean," he decides to say, just in case. "And you definitely  _didn't_ see that car coming, or else you wouldn't have walked out in front of it. I distinctly remember your dad telling us to look both ways before we crossed the street when we were kids." 

"A pedestrian is killed every two hours and injured every eight minutes in a vehicular accident," Shawn echoes, which is exactly how Henry had decided to teach two eight-year-olds about the dangers of jaywalking, which of course Shawn can remember perfectly. 

"See, you remember. Too bad you couldn't remember that two minutes ago."

"Gus? Are you joking? Making jokes? Right  _now?_ " Shawn goes a little paler. "Holy shit, is it like, bad?" 

Gus can't figure out if he's just a bad liar (he definitely is) or if he should be insulted that Shawn would only assume that he's capable of making jokes in a bad situation, but either way, if it makes Shawn stop long enough for them to make it to a hospital, he's going to milk it. 

"It could be," he says. "Do you want to wait for an ambulance to show up or should I just drive you?" 

Shawn gives him a very intense once over, and then carefully presses his hand to his left side and glares at the bleeding road rash on his right arm. "Drive me," he says.

Shawn has bruised ribs and mild shock. He makes a couple of jokes about it not being nearly as bad as Gus had acted like it was, but neither of them actually regrets the hospital trip. 

(The pain medication they give him, on the other hand, destroys Shawn's ability to filter through sensory input. By the time they make it back to his apartment, he has his jaw clenches so tightly Gus can hear his teeth grind together, and he spends the rest of his time under its influence curled into a ball despite the pain in his ribs. Both of them regret that part. Gus dumps the rest of the pills in the trash, digs out a bottle of Motrin, and makes a mental note to update Shawn's 'avoided medications' list. 

* * *

The thing about Shawn is that it never only goes one way. 

For every time Gus has to stop to check on Shawn, Shawn is doing something twice as reckless to make sure that Gus is equally safe. 

For Gus it's checking injuries, making sure that Shawn has eaten and is staying hydrated, making him slow down when he's going too hard too fast, it's doing his taxes for him, lying and playing along to help him keep up the psychic act. 

For Shawn it's following Gus into a bank held hostage, interrupting a bad date when Gus needs an out, forcing Gus out of his own head every once in a while, it's talking rapid fire to a trigger-happy suspect to keep the muzzle pointed at himself, lying about Gus's name so that nothing gets back to his more "professional" employers. 

Each of them has something they can do that the other can't, and some shortcoming that the other can make up for. Maybe it's codependent, but it definitely works. Neither of them quite fits in with other people, but it's never been an issue because they've always had each other. 

Other people might not understand, but Gus doesn't need them to. He and Shawn understand each other, and that's all that's ever mattered. 

**Author's Note:**

> Since I've already revived this series with a vengeance, if anyone has any concepts they'd like to see written just let me know and I'll see what I can do!
> 
>  
> 
> [my tumblr](http://www.princex-n.tumblr.com)


End file.
